Count on several things happening during David Blaine: In Spades: Blaine will float above the audience; Blaine will demonstrate his ability to hold his breath for a long time; Blaine will perform card tricks easy to see from every seat in the house; and he will put himself at risk to an extreme magicians and illusionists dare not approach.
He also likes being a resident headliner in Vegas, returning to the intimate setting of Resort World Theatre every month through June. Seats have been filled by the likes of Dr. Dre and Eminem, director Darren Aronofsky and DJ Martin Garrix, Sasha and Malia Obama, and Woody Harrelson and Marion Cotillard. Danny DeVito and his son Jake joined the ranks of audience participants at a Jan. 14 performance.
It was around then that Blaine had a slight accident and slammed his hand through a Styrofoam cup onto an ice pick. One would think dropping nine stories onto cardboard boxes in the theater’s front orchestra section might be the act to lead to injury, but it was a simple trick like he used to do as a street magic practitioner in the late-’90s.
Then, the main danger was walking into an unfamiliar neighborhood, but Blaine was inspired by feats of human endurance that made Harry Houdini an escape master. As a child, Blaine trained himself to hold his breath. As an adult, he put that ability to use by publicly testing the limits of how long the human body could remain submerged in water or encased in ice.
What makes Blaine a lure is a factor outlined by Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. The act that gets the most money gives the audience “feelings they weren’t sure they should enjoy, but they do.” Jimmy Fallon is not sure he should enjoy Blaine chewing up nails and snorting one out a nostril or spitting out a live frog during appearances on The Tonight Show, but he does.
Blaine also has a laconic speaking delivery that can suddenly shift into a macabre mode, which some Resorts World guests experience when he roams the property performing magic. His expertise results from practice, which he’s been doing nonstop since his mother gave him his first deck of cards as a small child. “It’s not that I’m good at what I do necessarily by default,” he said during an appearance at the 2019 World Economic Forum. “It’s that I’ve spent a lot of time practicing.”
It was a 2009 TED Talk where Blaine best expressed his secret of his success, though. “As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible,” he told the audience. “And I think magic, whether I’m holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple … It’s practice and training and experimenting while pushing through the pain to be the best I can be.”
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